Feature Articles

With the growing number of “check lists” and mounting pressures to improve quality, safety, efficiency and performance, it is easy for healthcare providers to lose sight of an essential part of medicine – compassion.

A recently released article in the Journal of Pediatric Quality and Safety shows the independent research results of an observational study on how to reduce the time nurses and physicians spend on communication tasks that take them away from patient care in a critical care environment.

It was a Monday night, the busiest time in the ED. The ED charge nurse received an alert on her Vocera smartphone app. The alert was from Qventus, which predicts operational bottlenecks and recommends course corrections. The alert was telling the charge nurse that the ED was going to have a surge of patients in two hours. Qventus predicted this with machine learning based on the current census in the ED, historical admit and discharge times, the practice patterns of the clinicians currently working in the ED, and the current queue and expected turnaround times for diagnostic tests.

A physician needed to perform emergency surgery at a hospital that was in the same large integrated delivery network she worked in, but not her home hospital. As she set out to prep for the case, she needed to contact the care team, including the on-call ER doctor, surgery team, and the person in charge of room scheduling. She needed to find and obtain supplies.

Many of us are familiar with the term “the internet of things” (IoT), but only some know that the road to IoT began back in 1982, when grad students from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University connected a modified Coke vending machine to the internet. This technology turned the machine into a basic smart device because it was able to provide networked status reports to the students about inventory and temperature control.

Healthcare organizations need to have true confidence in their data, which is the foundation for all care, reporting, financial, and compliance efforts. However, it’s no secret that the healthcare arena is challenged when it comes to accessing and leveraging that data.

Identifying the three pillars that explain a service management’s solutions strength can be found in three simple principles: it’s standard and simple; it provides a shared service solution; and it provides for service chain integration. These are the pillars in which service management solutions excel, that should be part of its DNA for the benefit of its users and the organizations that employ it.

There is a plethora of data available to doctors and hospitals today, which is collected from medical devices, instruments and monitors, in settings from doctors' offices to hospital wards to emergency trauma centers. In addition, personal devices, from Apple Watches to Fitbits and everything in between, are collecting steady streams of information on a variety of metrics, from heartbeat to movement and activity data to calories consumed.

For many years Northwest New Mexico’s Gallup ranked number one nationally in the number of alcohol-related deaths. This reputation also killed many residents’ spirits, contributing to addiction, joblessness and homelessness, further highlighting the need for behavioral health care in this region. Native American youth have the highest rates of alcoholism of any racial group in the country, according to the National Institutes of Health.